Will a bzillion dollars fix our schools?

May 07, 2001|By Dennis Byrne. Dennis Byrne is a Chicago- area writer and public affairs consultant.

You'd think from the tone of the debate on the floor of the Senate over education that the U.S. was spending close to nothing to improve public elementary and secondary schools.

The likes of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) thundered their righteous indignation that nothing of substance could be debated until the stingy Bush administration agreed to release its choke hold on our schools. They almost made it sound as if President Bush personally had his cheap hands around the throats of our schoolchildren. Any reasonable person listening to Kennedy and Wellstone might have concluded that they were right.

Again, is it too much to ask for some facts before flying off the handle in a demagogic snit?

Bush proposes $44.5 billion in discretionary spending for the Department of Education in fiscal year 2002, beginning Oct. 1. That's an 11.5 percent increase in budget authority over this fiscal year, and the biggest proposed increase for any domestic agency. Some, confused by the rhetoric over Bush's tax cut, might wonder if all this money is going to the rich, while stiffing those who need it most. Actually not. The education budget always hands out greater sums to benefit low-income, special-needs and minority children. Bush is proposing a $459 million increase in Title I money targeted at low-income students, bringing the total to $9.1 billion. Special education gets $8.5 billion. There's $175 million for new charter schools and $900 million for funding Bush's "Reading First" program.

The Kennedys and the Wellstones say that's not nearly enough and there's no use debating the details of any education program until the numbers get larger. But how large is large enough? On what basis do we judge that taxpayers are getting anything for their money? Certainly, for a government agency that didn't exist a generation ago, the Department of Education is doing very well, thank you. We're arguing over increases of $6 billion in a single year for a department that 20 years ago had budget authority of a total of $6 billion for elementary, secondary and vocational education.

Nor is it like public education is starving. Total expenditures for public elementary through high schools in 1960 were $87 billion. In 1999, they amounted to an estimated $344.2 billion. With 87.4 million public school students, that comes out to more than $7,200 per student.

So, is $400 billion enough? How about $600 billion? A trillion? How do we decide? Some might argue that if you correlate student performance with the amount of money Washington has put into the pot, federal aid has been counterproductive. I, however, won't make that argument.

But I will argue that deciding how much we're going to spend before we decide how to spend it is idiotic political pandering. For example, I think Bush's proposal to give states $320 million to test the blazes out of kids is a bad idea. Bush, sadly, has bought too much into the whole idea of a centralized education system, despite his protestations that he wants to empower local schools.

Or another example. It is the height of Potomac and educational arrogance to deny parents the right to pull their children out of failing schools and to take them and their tax dollars to schools the parents choose. With all the lip service being given to "parental responsibility," the fact is that parents have very little authority over their children's public education. The way things are going, they are likely to have even less.

For those looking to this corner for some positive answers, I've already offered my modest proposal: To separate kids into classes based on their willingness to learn. That offended some, who suggested that educating children is too complex a subject for simple minds such as mine (and the parents and teachers who wrote saying they loved the idea).

Fine, then I have another idea. Instead of sniffing around like a blind dog searching for a bone, let's go to the heart of our troubles: The colleges of education. When a carmaker turns out unsafe cars, consumers, politicians and everyone else jump all over the manufacturer. When utilities fail to produce enough electricity to meet demand, we know whom to blame.

But when America's school system turns out worse and worse lemons--as we're told--why do colleges of education escape unscathed? They are at the heart of the school system, they are the institution that crafts the whacko theories of education and trains the teachers. They should not escape coming under the microscope, as have everyone else.

For years and years, American students of all ages have labored under ever-more goofy systems of learning, such as whole language and other gobbledygook. It is the brave principal or teacher who stands up to such nonsense and insists on teaching basics, or the classics, or mathematical drills, or spelling skills or phonics.

None of that costs any more than what we're already paying. In fact, it might cost less. But until the Kennedys and Wellstones can tell us what they would do with our money, only a fool would give them more.